Innholdsfortegnelse for 3/13/2023 i The Big Issue

Opinion Amanda Spielman Prison education is in a dire state. Ofsted inspects England’s nurseries, schools, colleges and apprenticeships too, but for years prison education has been the worst performing area we look at. Perhaps that’s not surprising. Some might say that educating prisoners shouldn’t be a priority. But if we’re serious about rehabilitation as a society, education in prison should get much more attention than it currently does. If prisoners leave at the end of their sentence without any of the basic skills needed to navigate their way through life, then they are much less likely to find work and more likely to reoffend. On average, almost a quarter of the people sent to prison are reoffenders. The cost of sending the same people back to prison time and again…

It’s the morning after the final date on the Strictly Come Dancing live tour and – following some tearful farewells to his fellow dancers – we’ve taken reigning champion Hamza Yassin for a restorative walk in one of Glasgow’s dear green places. He’s ditched the sequins for his more usual, practical outdoor wear and, walking stick in hand, he’s climbing down the side of a narrow brook, poking at mossy roots and branches. In terms of wildness, Pollok Park may not compete with the natural history filmmaker’s home in the remote west coast of Scotland… but that’s not to say there aren’t surprises to be found. Well within the promised 10 minutes, there’s triumph. Poo has been located, proof of otters secured. “There! There’s the bit of scat! It’s just…

As the 1950s began, Lee Grant was set for a stellar Hollywood career. Her debut in Detective Story had won her an Academy Award nomination, the best actress award at the Cannes Film Festival and the praise of her co-star Kirk Douglas, who said she was “a beautiful young girl with extraordinary talent and a big future”. Then the McCarthyites came knocking. “And it was all over,” Grant tells The Big Issue, speaking over video from the bedroom of her Manhattan apartment. Dragged in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee – suspected of communist sympathies like her husband, screenwriter Arnold Manoff – she was blacklisted from film and television for the next 12 years. A lesser person may have been cowed. Grant was galvanised. She then went toe-to-toe with…

AUTISM The free trial subscription is a ‘tax’ on the neurodiverse Money is pretty important in this world of ours, and generally speaking autistic people find it difficult to secure and keep it, for a variety of reasons. We often, in tongue-in-cheek moments, refer to the ways that autistic people or those with ADHD lose money hand over fist as the ‘neurodivergent tax’, mostly because it feels like a pretty universal experience and appears to be totally unavoidable. Let’s take a moment to look at a particularly clear and painful example of this very problem: free trials on subscriptions. I’ll take you back a few years to illustrate this. I’ve successfully navigated the confusing nightmare of early adulthood in the relatively safe harbour of Loughborough University, have somehow secured my…

COST OF LIVING AI-generated recipes will help you make the most of reduced items Say you’re wandering through the supermarket and bright yellow stickers of reduced items catch your eye. What are you supposed to cook with this random batch of nearly-out-of-date ingredients? A new AI-generated cookbook with thousands of recipes has the secrets. The Yellow Sticker Cookbook is a web-based app and online tool where you scan in the reduced items you’ve picked up from the supermarket, along with those you already have in your cupboard, and it will generate recipe after recipe to inspire your next feast. Entering ingredients or taking a photo in the shop will turn up dozens of possible recipes from across the web. The cost-of-living crisis is forcing people to make dangerous sacrifices. One…

Everyone fears poverty, so why haven’t we declared war on it? I have always held the opinion that poverty is the greatest social driver in the history of the human world. That when the aristocrats of the Ancien Régime before the French Revolution, for instance, held elaborate parties with gold candlestick holders and fine and elaborate decor, they were proving how far they were from poverty. That when you look at how wasteful the truly wealthy are, with their flotilla of houses and luxury items, their expensive drop-dead watches, they are demonstrating once again how far they are from poverty. Deep within their psychology is still that nagging seed of poverty that they try to deprive of light and water so that it does not grow and choke out the…

REVIEWS A powerful poetry of witness The Speculations of Country People is the debut collection by award-winning Irish poet Majella Kelly. In this tender and inquisitive book, the land and its associated flora and fauna is a key character, as are women’s bodies and bodily autonomy. It is divided into four parts that oscillate between an intimate interiority – poems about desire, family, controlling relationships and self-discovery – and a powerful poetry of witness. Along with its strong, lyrical voice, the book’s sections are held together by evocative personifications of the natural world. A lake, for example, is layered with inherited history – another theme prevalent in Kelly’s work and intricately explored. “That’s the depth of the lake’s happiness,” she writes. “It’s generational and therefore deeper than any scientific measurement…

In this crazy world, it’s hard to know what fashion even is, let alone be able to predict trends. If someone told me that dressing like Mr Blobby was going to be big in spring/summer ’23 I wouldn’t bat an eyelid. Of course, it doesn’t help that I am now at an age where I think an M&S waterfall cardigan is the height of fashion, and trends that I used to wear have come around at least twice, including flares, low-rise jeans and a relentless stream of Bianca from EastEnders puffa jackets. Yet the twisty wheel of fashion continues to turn, regardless of whether unadventurous leopard print-clad old bags like me can understand it. And haute couture will always be deeply silly and fabulously liberating. There’s really nothing to stop…

The warning was there. It wasn’t obscured, it wasn’t couched in double speak, it was plain and it was stark. Almost a year ago to the day the charity Crisis warned of a tidal wave of homelessness coming. Nearly 97 per cent of the councils in England they spoke to said they feared an increase was inevitable. The reasons included, most prominently, an end to the eviction ban, introduced to protect the poorest during Covid, and loss of the £20 uplift in universal credit. This came before the terrifying scale of the cost-of-living crisis and soaring inflation was known. And whaddayaknow – it happened! And it’s not slowing. The government’s own most recent figures for England showed an increase of 4.4 per cent in people who, in the distancing language…

Get in touch The Big Issue, 2nd floor, 43 Bath Street, Glasgow G2 1HW letters@bigissue.com @bigissue /bigissueUK @bigissueuk @thebigissue A bad bet The Big Issue were right to point out that betting shops have become – in fact, have long been for many decades – the scourge of the high street in almost every town [Issue 1551, February 13]. The figures that are highlighted in your report are truly staggering. Numbers on their own, however, do not reveal the whole, devastating picture of ‘gambling saturation’. Take the cases of Boston in Lincolnshire and the Erdington constituency of Birmingham – two of the most deprived communities in the country. It is clear that the most vulnerable in our society are being targeted by gambling companies. Gambling addiction harms; gambling addiction kills…

By the time I was 16 I was desperate to learn to drive and have the freedom to get out of Anstruther [a small coastal town in Fife] and go to gigs and the cinema. Anstruther didn’t have a cinema, so my dad started to run this big projection system in the function suite of the [Bowman family-run] hotel, mostly for putting the football on at weekends. But on a Saturday morning he set up a little film club and put on stuff like Bugsy Malone and The Goonies. It was amazing to have that; I would sit and help him stamp people’s membership cards when they came in, things like that. And there was always music around, with my mum taking me to gigs and the bands playing at…

ALAN LOMAX The man who created a ‘global jukebox’ for us all Just before the turn of the millennium, there was one album that seemed to follow me everywhere. From nightclubs to cafes, from TV shows to the ads in between, an unlikely marriage between creakily recorded blues and gospel ballads and glimmering electronic beats. Moby’s multiplatinum-selling album Play, perhaps owing to the fact that all 17 tracks were eventually commercially licensed, was at one time inescapable. The samples that gave Moby’s LP its spiritual backbone came from a CD box set called Sounds of the South: A Musical Journey from the Georgia Sea Islands to the Mississippi Delta. A collection of field recordings gathered by the pioneering folklorist and ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax. Lomax, who died in 2002, dedicated his…

Until recently I had been rough sleeping in London for 25 months. I was never far away from a Big Issue vendor and became friends with them, and a regular reader. I never saw my situation as long term and The Big Issue ticked all the boxes for my planned road to recovery. I have very limited capability to work because I have PTSD, so this was an ideal opportunity for me, and a challenge. To be able to communicate with people at a personal level on the street is beautiful, it means a lot to me. And I enjoy being outdoors in all weathers. My family was temporarily housed in Milton Keynes when I was in London. We had been evicted from a private rental after the landlord decided…